Inside the kiosk, Churcher used an electronic card key to summon the elevator and descend to the sanctum below. Then, for the next thirty minutes, at which time his preprogrammed Rolex would interrupt, he sat in communion with a turbulent work.
The pigments were deposited in broad, impulsive strokes that hurried across the canvas evoking the all too swift passage of time. They delineated the baleful “Portrait of Dr. Felix Rey.” The hard-edged figure stood against a frenzied background that was in sharp contrast to the subject’s cool, incisive stare. The signature in the lower right corner read simply—“Vincent.”
Churcher was awestruck by his newest acquisition. The power of it consumed him, and assured him of his own. Indeed his collecting went beyond appreciation. The act of possession, of exclusivity, of having what no other man would have, had always been the wellspring of his ambition and confidence. He stepped closer, until the edges of the rectangle blurred and the texture of the strokes sharpened.
Suddenly, something disturbing caught his eye. The spell rudely broken, he scrutinized the suspect area, and found it — a single brush stroke on the doctor’s large, fleshy mouth out of sync with the others; an overworked splash of alizarin crimson where a smaller brush with much finer bristles than used elsewhere had carefully pushed the thick paint into the proper shape.
Finding it was equivalent to noticing one frame missing from an entire movie. But details were Churcher’s strength. This unique acuity, combined with imagination, ambition, and hard work, had redefined the meaning of success in business.
Churcher was deep in concentration when the Rolex beeped, directing his attention to a round of meetings. He flinched and clicked it off. An unnerving hollowness came over him, as if a monumental indiscretion had been threatened with exposure — and one had. He wasn’t concerned someone might discover his museum was a concrete bunker built to withstand a nuclear holocaust. No, it wasn’t exposure of his paranoia that frightened him, but exposure of its genesis.
Churcher felt the strong pull of his business engagements and knew he had to leave. He glanced once more at the Van Gogh, lifted it from the wall, zipped it in a leather portfolio, and took it with him.
He had no doubt it was a fake.
That same afternoon in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, a lakeside hamlet just south of Concord, a swirling wind blew snow against the facade of a stone cottage. The modest dwelling stood on a rise at the end of a long, unplowed drive.
The door hadn’t been opened since the doctor, who visited weekly, closed it when he left five days ago. A glistening drift curved up the weathered cedar to a knocker that hung from the mouth of a brass lion’s head. The cat’s-eyes kept watch over acres of bare maples and snow-laden evergreens.
In a dormered bedroom on the second floor, Sarah Winslow lay under an old quilt. Her eyes — once clear blue and sparkling with mischievous appeal, but now dulled, the whites glazed yellow — stared out the window into the haze she had come to associate with February, the month of death.
In the Northeast, people died in February. Sarah’s father died in February; her husband, Zachary; an aunt; and half sister, too. And Sarah was quite certain when it was her time, it would be in February. Therefore, every year since the diagnosis, this being the fourth, the first of March was the most important day of the year for Sarah Winslow. But today, and every day for the last week, the pain came from deeper inside than ever before, and she knew this February would be her’s.
She dreaded it. Not because she was afraid of death — she’d long since come to grips with the idea, lately even welcomed it — but because of a nagging awareness that not all her affairs were in order. One in particular, long ignored but never forgotten, demanded her attention.
Sarah turned her head from the window. Her eyes swept the room, taking in each item: the eyelet lace curtain, blown by warm air that came from a grille in the floor; the delicately flowered wallpaper she’d hung one spring in a redecorating frenzy; the bentwood clothes rack, heavy with coats and sweaters and topped by her collection of hats; and the stained mirror, silent witness to her patient taming of Zachary during the first months of their marriage forty-five years ago.
Finally, as they had many times each day in recent weeks, Sarah’s eyes came to rest on a framed black-and-white photograph.
She looked at it sort of sideways, with the annoyed expression she managed to affect whenever the pictured beckoned. The very same one she used to level at Zachary whenever he reminded her to do something she had been purposely avoiding.
Sarah rolled onto her right side and pushed up shakily on an elbow. She squinted hard at the picture, staring it down like an old adversary.
“Be sure. Be certain,” she told herself. “Got the rest of your life to make up your mind.” She managed a sarcastic chuckle and grimaced at the pain it sent through her, then settled back onto the pillows.
She lay there unmoving for a few moments.
Then she slipped a hand between the buttons of her nightgown moving it down across the warmth of her stomach until it touched the softness below.
She left it there until the twilight came over her and the pain went away.
Chapter Two
“Romance her if you have to, Phil,” said the President of the United States.
“No way. Not for all the Porsches in Stuttgart,” Keating replied in a tone born of their many years together in the military and government.
“For your country,” the President chided. “I’m your Commander-in-Chief, old buddy, and I just gave you a direct order.”
President James Hilliard winked, wrinkling his strong Gallic face, then smoothed his auburn beard. The first President since Benjamin Harrison in 1893 to sport one, he was fastidious about it.
“I can just see Will’s column now,” he said. “How does the President expect to tame the Russians when he can’t tame his own facial hair?”
Keating responded with an obligatory chuckle.
A short time earlier, Philip Taylor Keating, chief U.S. disarmament negotiator, had crossed the snow-dappled grounds of Camp David to the presidential cottage to discuss upcoming talks in Geneva. During the next few days, Keating would be briefing NATO representatives — assuring them the United States could go toe-to-toe with the Russians and come away with a draw, without jeopardizing any member countries.
The two men sat in shirtsleeves across the table in the library. The President leaned back and centered his tie between heavily starched collar points.
“We need her, Phil,” he said sternly. “Support from Bonn is the key. Whatever it takes. I don’t want Gisela Pomerantz screwing this up. And according to Jake,” he went on, referring to Jake Boulton, director of Central Intelligence, “neither does Premier Kaparov. Despite official denials, his health is deteriorating rapidly, and it’s no secret he sees disarmament as his legacy. You with me?”
Keating nodded automatically. He heard the words, but he was thinking about Gisela Pomerantz, West Germany’s deputy minister for strategic deployment. They were young diplomats when they first met twelve years ago at the NATO Defense College in Rome. And Keating could still hear the ringing voice of the orientation officer that first day.
“As NATO’s most promising diplomatic and military personnel,” the instructor intoned, “you’ll be called on to manage crises on a global scale — and we’re going to teach you how. Now, it’s very important you make fast friendships here. These personal alliances will pay off down the line when you contact someone you actually know to get action in a crisis situation. Also important is the need for consensus, which, as you know, is always NATO’s biggest problem.”